A week of firsts! :D (And a comparison of the Warhammer 40k vs online gaming communities)

The title provides enough introduction, so let's dive straight in, shall we!

The first (and most epic, from my point of view) first we're going to be talking about is my first officially published column! Weehaay! Hooray! Etcetera! I find it really cool that now I'm not just some idiot publishing his ramblings on a free blogging service, I'm an idiot having his ramblings published for him on an established, proudly South African (lol) gaming site! Yes, ladies and gentleman, I'm feeling pretty legit right now. For those of you who didn't see my Facebook status, or who I haven't already pestered enough, click here to go to the column in question.

Feeling pretty damned ampd about it. Got a positive comment from some random, my editor and a bunch of the other authors on the site liked it and it got like 32 Facebook reccomendations. I'm entirely sure what those are, but they sound pretty cool.

Second first, I got my first follower! No jokes, if you direct your attention to the box at the bottom right of your screen (you may have to scroll down a bit) you'll see a little block with a silhouetted head in it, and if you hover your mouse over that head it'll say 'mlpdarth'! Righteous! Now, let me tell you a bit about Mr mlpdarth. A lad by the name of Sam Wolski, I met him at provincial trials for debating last year (aaaah! What's that IRL doing on my gaming blog!), he embodies the phrase truly epic. I believe we spent all of 55 minutes of a one hour prep session talking absolute crap, and the other 5 realising we had to make a case. Needless to say, lulz ensued.

Regardless! He has a blog, which I have been stalking for more time than I care to admit. Two, actually, one covering his daily life and the other covering... wait for it.. his Warhammer 40k life! Aaaaaw yeah :D So, I started off stalking his 40k blog, but it doesn't update enough to sate my appetite, so I started reading his IRL blog as well. And it isn't half bloody bad. So I followed both his blogs, and now he's followed me back. And after that extremely lengthy explanation, I'm going to end that tangent with 2 statements:

1) Be awesome and check out his blog by clicking here, or be even more awesome and check out his 40k blog by clicking here.
2) I wonder if he realises who the hell I am, or if he was just following back out of blogger courtesy...

Ok, I don't really have any other major firsts. But two in one week is pretty decent! I did also finish painting my first Warhammer 40k model, and Nick Geffen (the only tame ginger yet known to man) and I hit the local nerd gathering to engage in a bit of glorious combat (I won :D). Now, before you stop reading, and start telling me how 40k is a stupid investment, I promise you that a full justification, explanation and defense (ification?) of my interests is on the way, but I'm tired as hell, so it's not coming just yet.

What I am going to spend the rest of the time talking about, however, is how awesome I find the Warhammer 40k community, compared to pretty much any online community for whichever game you care to mention.

Thing is, the majority of most any major game's online community can be summed up in one word: assholes. Granted, you find some cool people every now and then, and granted in the higher tiers of the StarCraft 2 community you get awesome people like Husky and Day9 who valiantly give their time to grow the SC2 community and the eSports community in general. But two men do not a majority make. The majority of gamers (myself included, many a time) look down on 'noobs' as if they were the scum of the earth, the proverbial dog crap on the sole of their shoe, which they are forced to waste their precious time scraping off. The problem here is twofold: one, it means that these poor noobs, who have very little idea of WHAT IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS SACRED IS GOING ON IN THIS MENTAL GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE, have an even worse time because of it, meaning that the game simply is not an enjoyable experience; two, it either makes noobs think that the manner in which they have been treated is the acceptable or correct way to treat noobs, or they get so pissed off about it that they take out their frustrations on the only people they can - noobs who are noobier than themselves. Thus the cycle of assholism (that's a word, folks) is perpetuated, and people are, if anything, driven away from eSports and online gaming in general.

As I said before, this doesn't count for everyone, just most people. There are those who realise that they were once noobs too, and there are even those who go out of their way to help the poor bastards, but, like I said, they are not the majority.

Why am I saying all of this? Well, contrast is to my and Nick's experience at the Battle Bunker last Tuesday. 'Twas 40k night at the aforementioned Bunker of Batlle, and Nick and I rocked up, with our command of the rules being directly proportional to the amount of paint on my models... which is to say, not a lot. The veterans were all there, and instead of leaving us to our misguided efforts to play a game we had very little experience in, they jumped into action and immediately made us feel right at home as part of the community. They took turns helping us out, firstly with the basics of the rules, then with more specific ingame advice and clarification and then more in depth strategy tutelage - hell, some guy who played the same race as Nick gave him a lesson lasting nearly 2 hours on how to be awesome with their race! The crazy thing is how excited they were to have us there. No matter the stupid question, they were more than eager to answer and make sure we had an awesome time.

Needless to say, we did.

The contrast between my experience of being a CoD4 and StarCraft 2 noob (and now seeing the reaction of the Team Fortress 2 community to all of the new players being added to their ranks because of the game becoming free), and being a Warhammer 40k noob is about as stark as you're ever going to get.

While some masochists may enjoy the petty jackassish behaviour and general idiocy of online gamers one has to suffer through in the early stages of the learning curve of a particular online game (and hell, even in the later stages, too), I am not among them. Where I more awake, I would do more analysis on that contrast, its reasons for existence and what to conclude from them, but as I said I'm tired as hell. So that'll have to wait for another day.

Last thing! My next column is due in two weeks, and I am now a proper, legit and official writer for eGamer! Sorry, still pretty ampd about it :P

Much <3 guys, hope you're sleeping right now.

Duncan
Out